Thursday, March 5, 2015

Four Guns to the Border (Universal, 1954)

Nice little Western

Rory Calhoun
Westerns are rarely if ever great classics of the genre but they are all worth
a watch. Smoke, as he was known, had been a cowpuncher, among other trades, in
his youth and knew something of the West. Given a screen test at Fox by Alan Ladd’s
wife, who saw him riding, he debuted as Frank McGown but David O Selznick changed
his name to Rory Calhoun. His first part in an oater was with Guy Madison in Massacre River in 1949 and there
followed Sand, A Ticket to Tomahawk and four more B-Westerns
before he hit the big time in River of No Returnwith Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe in 1954.Four
Guns was his eleventh Western. He was in thirty all told and very many TV
shows; in particular, he was The Texan on
CBS for two seasons, 1958 – 60. So it was quite a Western career. For me he
never quite convinced, always looking
a bit slick somehow, but there’s no denying that some of his cowboy films are
quite good in their way.

Rory Calhoun as Western tough guy. He almost convinces.

Universal
in the 1950s, as we know well, did a lot of Westerns and threw some budget at
them too. Think of all those Audie Murphy pictures, with decent directors and
good photography of attractive Western locations in Technicolor. OK, they were
rather formulaic but that was a characteristic of Westerns. One is fond of the
conventions. And each one is slightly different anyway. Four Guns to the Border was rather a typical example. It was
directed by ex-actor in B-movies Richard Carlson, who had had a medium-sized
part in Seminole with Rock Hudson the
year before; this was his first Western as director. He later starred in Mackenzie’s Raiders on TV, you may
remember, and worked, as actor or director on many other TV Westerns. He made a fair fist of Four Guns and the movie gallops along.

Actor-director Carlson did a lot of Westerns

One of
the great things about Four Guns is
the casting. The four in question are a band of (not very good) bank robbers
headed by Rory, and the other three are George Nader, Jay Silverheels and John
McIntire. That’s a pretty good gang. Not so much Nader: he had become famous
the year before in the 3D thriller Robot
Monster (a classic junker) and was a bit of a beefcake star. He didn’t do
many Westerns, only four and a couple of Laramie
episodes, but he was quite well known at the time. However, with McIntire and
Silverheels in your gang you were well on the trail to exciting shoot-‘em-ups.

As for
Jay Silverheels, Tonto also did a whole heap of Western movies, in which he was often
very good. He made quite a specialty of playing Geronimo (Broken Arrow, The Battle at Apache Pass, Walk the Proud Land) but
also rode along in many guises, often an Indian of course, from Kit Carson in 1940 right through to The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing in 1973. I
always like to see his name in the cast. In Four
Guns he is very dashing as badman in a bright green headscarf, and he is
really nice to a litter of kittens, so obviously a goodie at heart.

Nice 50s poster

And then
Walter Brennan (1894 – 1974) is old Simon Bhumer, the pop of lusted-after
tomboy Lolly (Colleen Miller, Tony Curtis’s squeeze Zoe in The Rawhide Years). Mr. Brennan made 114 Western appearances on the big and
small screen, from being a stuntman/extra in the Hoot Gibson silent The Calgary Stampede in 1925 right
through to Smoke in the Wind, directed
by his son Andy in 1975. He was often the crusty old sidekick, of course, many times
with John Wayne, and hardly ever the villain – a pity really as he was splendid
as Old Man Clanton in My Darling Clementine.
It may surprise you to know that Brennan was the first actor to accumulate
three Academy Awards and to date he is still the only actor to win three Oscars
as Best Supporting Actor. In Four Guns he is very protective of his girl, what
with all those Indians around as well as handsome badmen. “She ain’t gonna
marry no gunslinger,” he warns them. Colleen shows quite a daring amount of leg
for 1954 and appears in a sensational wet-nightgown scene.

Colleen Miller as Lolly and Walter Brennan as her pop

We’ve
also got Charles Drake as the sheriff and Nestor Paiva as the café owner,
Greasy. New Mexican Paul Brinegar (you know, Wishbone) is the barber. It’s a
good cast alright.

There’s
lovely Apple Valley scenery as they ride through dangerous but beautiful Apache
lands (1881 New Mexico), photographed by the great Russell Metty in
Technicolor.

It’s a
classic tale of badmen doing the right thing in the end and as such is really
not much out of the ordinary but the locations and casting make this Western a
notch above the usual run-of-the-mill oater and I recommend a look at it if it
comes on TV.